Self Reference a file

Hi Anthony,

I'm not aware of any built-in feature that will do that. The reference files can be renamed with a VBA macro or an addin, but you would need to have ensure that other attachments aren't renamed by accident.

Found what I was looking for. Save relative path must not be checked.  Seems opposite of what is should be, as I wanted a relative path and not a absolute path.

Is it automatically renaming the attachments?

It was not renaming except for the original sheet view from the seed file.  I since resolved the problem with the related box unchecked.  I did realize that something else is happening.  I created a model in the original file and the sheet views referenced the model.  Another uses made a copy of the drawing, placed in a different folder and renamed it.  Some how changing the model in the copy changed the original model.   The only references to the original model was in the sheet view.  Problem is the original and copy models were both changed.  I need to ask the other user some more question on how changes were made.  I am a little worried about file preservation as it is very common for us to start with an existing drawing and change it for another application.

Anthony Hlad said:

it is very common for us to start with an existing drawing and change it for another application

That's a good way to propagate file corruption. It can start out small & build from file to file. You start new drawing from clean seed files. Then you can reference in other files and copy or merge what you need.

Good point.  The seed file I have is a sheet view with title block and the model view.  Sheet view is setup to reference model view.  The file I am working I added extra model and sheet views.  Ended up with 2 models and 6 sheets.  One sheet is just an embedded excel spreadsheat the other five references a model or part of.   If I want to create a new standalone drawing that has 80% same geometry as the original and keep all the geometry in the same position on the sheet views, how should one efficiently go about that?

The geometry portion is simple. After you create your new file, you can simple model in the old one and either merge that reference or copy as much geometry as you need. This procedure filters out corrupted data (It's actually one way to try to recover data from a corrupted file).

The sheets would be a little different, since I assume that your model references have been scaled and moved to your border. That would require repetitive rework to create from scratch. I would be tempted to import copies of the sheet models from the original files and just repath the attachments. That flies in the face of what we just said about clean fresh files...but often sheet files are literally just collectors of references with a handful of text. I don't see as much corruptions from those as I do design models. But I'd be interested in what others might suggest.

The geometry portion is simple. After you create your new file, you can simple model in the old one and either merge that reference or copy as much geometry as you need. This procedure filters out corrupted data (It's actually one way to try to recover data from a corrupted file).

The sheets would be a little different, since I assume that your model references have been scaled and moved to your border. That would require repetitive rework to create from scratch. I would be tempted to import copies of the sheet models from the original files and just repath the attachments. That flies in the face of what we just said about clean fresh files...but often sheet files are literally just collectors of references with a handful of text. I don't see as much corruptions from those as I do design models. But I'd be interested in what others might suggest.